When less is more

My productivity has been at about zero for the last three days. Granted, that's not a steep decline, but it is a decline.

I got my new MacBook Air. The one with the solid state hard drive. And I've been moving files, downloading programs,  tweaking settings, and generally just getting the thing all tricked out before I head to NECC on Friday. What a pain in the ass. (OK, my move to the cloud is taking longer than I had anticipated.)

This must be about the twelfth computer I have personally owned - starting with an Apple IIe back in 1984. The list has included Apples, Macs, PCs (even ones with the C prompt), desktops and laptops. Each getting better and better.

This is first time however that I have gone down in "feature sets." My previous MacBook had a faster processor, larger hard drive, a CD/DVD drive, and lots more ports. It was a dependable workhorse, no question.

What I find notable about the Air is what it does not have - no mechanical hard drive, no firewire, no CD/DVD drive built in, no separate Ethernet port, a little slower processor, and only one lonesome USB port. The reviews I read were not overly kind to this machine because of this.

But personally, I think this is an evolved machine - one that recognizes that wireless, not wired, connectivity is the reality. And it is rugged, very light, and feels faster than the machine with the faster processor. (Maybe it is the flash storage?) I don't remember the the last time I use the CD/DVD drive on my last computer, the firewire port except for the external back up drive that also had USB ports, or an Ethernet cable when not at my desk at work. My computer goes pretty much everywhere with me - throughout the district, home each night and on lots of trips. Dropping those few extra pounds is a real blessing in the way I use a computer.

As I see some "features" going away, I think about how nervous I was about buying computers that lacked a floppy disk drive, a serial port, a SCSI connection and a modem. When is the last time you missed any of those things?

 From the porch, over looking the lake, taking in the Air.

Picasso generator

Bring out your inner cubist...

From Mr. Picassohead

Scientific Commons and free image sites

My friend and colleague, Gary Hartzell passed this on to me:

This came across my screen and it looked like it could be useful in a lot of ways. ...

While the title says "Scientific Commons", the site contains access to materials in the and outside the natural sciences - such as social sciences.  For example, just type a word like "leadership" or "library" or "chemistry" or "science" or "teachers"  or "business" or "software" or "medicine"  or "religion" in the search box and take a look at the material it returns.

from the About Scientific Commons http://www.scientificcommons.org/ website:

ScientificCommons.org aims to provide the most comprehensive and freely available access to scientific knowledge on the internet.

The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. Currently ScientificCommons.org has indexed about 13 million scientific publications and successfully extracted 6 million authors' names out of this data (January 2007).                     

Anybody using this resource? 

• Presentation Zen has a list of 10 sites to find mostly high-rez and mostly public domain images. Some famous; some not so. 
• Here are another 10 sites with free images compliments of Search Engine Journal (via Stephen's Lighthouse). 
  

I'm getting in the mood to do a "scrapbook" entry to clear out my starred items in Google Reader. Be afraid. Be very afraid.